AMD plots 15 May server, mobile Athlon launch

Looks like Palomino's going to be led out to the course

AMD looks set to launch its next-generation Athlon, codenamed Palomino, at a special event on 15 May.

That, at least, is the most likely scenario. What the company will unveil isn't yet known for certain, but piecing together snippets of information from a variety of sources close to AMD and to its reseller channel, we expect AMD to unveil three varieties of the chip, aimed at the server, desktop and notebook markets, respectively.

We reckon AMD will launch the server and mobile parts, at the very least. According to the company's latest roadmap, revealed at its analyst meeting last week, Palominos aimed at mobile applications and at one- to two-way server and workstation roles are set to ship by the end of June.

Sources close to AMD had already told us that AMD will launch at these markets before targeting the desktop PC market, and sure enough, the roadmap has the desktop Palomino arriving early Q3.

The server version is new to us, in the sense that we'd always assumed that it would be identical to the desktop version. Channel sources suggest that it's a product in its own right. Offering more on-die cache - just as server-oriented Pentium III Xeons have more cache that desktop-oriented PIIIs - would seem the most likely way of differentiating the two.

AMD will launch its 760MP dual-processor chipset at the same time, we reckon. There's certainly little point in unveiling a CPU for two-way servers without reference to the board the pair of processors will inhabit.

The shipment timeframe of the mobile and server Athlons is only just ahead of Morgan, AMD's next-generation mobile Duron, so it's possible this too will be officially introduced to the world on the 15th. ®